‘It’s not your fault’

Published 5:16 pm, Sunday, March 20, 2011

A woman in Cleveland, Ohio, sent a message through The Advocate intended for the 11-year-old alleged 2010 sexual assault victim from Cleveland, Texas.

“It’s not your fault.”

The message was from Jennifer, whose full name has been withheld to protect her privacy. She read about the case online on Tuesday, March 15. Jennifer, 46, said that reading about the case immediately triggered memories of when she was a 13-year-old small-town teenager who was sexually abused by more than one high school senior. As far as the community of then about 4,000 residents was concerned, “I was willing,” Jennifer said.

Jennifer said that for years she blamed herself for what happened to her. She said a victim’s wedding night isn’t what it ought to be. Further, victims often make wrong choices in order to receive the approval of would-be abusers, she said, explaining that, “We become the people they want us to be.” She said that depression and substance abuse are sometimes associated with the aftermath, and she has continued to receive professional help for the latter.

Jennifer said it took 32 years for her to be able to talk to others about her victimization. Having cleared her own emotional hurdle, it took her but a few hours to decide to speak up after she read about the alleged victim in the Cleveland, Texas, case, in which police have arrested, as of deadline, 18 suspects.

“It’s going to be a long hard road, and it’s going to be for the rest of her life,” Jennifer said. “She’s going to feel the guilt, not [anyone who abused her]. She needs to get some counseling immediately. It’s very important for this little girl to get the right counseling.”

Anyone who needs the “right counseling” may find it in this area. Indeed there are licensed counselors in East Texas who are trained to help sexual abuse victims, particularly those who were abused in childhood.

Livingston-based Licensed Professional Counselor Anna L. Chancellor possesses such training and experience. She has East Texas clients, including some from San Jacinto County. Chancellor is affiliated with Clark Psychological and Consultation PC, the office locations of which include Livingston and Lufkin. She also operates a private practice in Livingston.

Chancellor said that in her experience, a support group was not the preferred starting point for clients traumatized by sexual abuse, particularly in childhood “because they’ve kept it secret and not expressed anything, not even allowed themselves to think a lot about it “because it was so painful. Even the support group — which I thought, ‘This will help’ — but they weren’t ready. This had happened years before, but they just couldn’t go there.

“I had been working with one person individually,” Chancellor continued, “and then I said, ‘How about a group?’ Then you could get the realization that you don’t face this alone, that there are others that have been put in the same situation. You can identify with their experience, and they can identify with yours. It might take a little bit of the stigma away to know that it wasn’t just you. Some of the things that you felt, they can validate.”

Chancellor reinforced Jennifer’s statement about victim “guilt,” explaining: “The things that this lady was talking about — the feelings of guilt and shame that are there — you got to find a way to deal with it. Most of the time, it’s just by suppressing, but it’s going to come out in various ways. I think that one of those would be, especially for a girl getting married, and some of the things that she experienced earlier that were wrong, now some of those things are going to be right in her relationship to her husband. How does she deal with that? That’s got to be a real problem.”

Children who were sexually abused often grow up to get emotionally knocked down in a wave of bitter memories and swept back out to a sea of the past in the undertow of long-term consequences. There are innumerable triggers.

“I had one lady that came to me, and when it really activated her, her daughter got to the age that she was when the sex abuse started for her,” Chancellor said. “Then seeing her daughter at that age just brought back a lot of memories. And that’s when she came into counseling.”

While no one knows the circumstances of the 11-year-old Cleveland girl’s life, except those close to her, there are common details among many children who are sexually abused, including the prelude.

“The first thing is that, most of the time, the perpetrator is someone that the child knows, and that’s what makes it so hard to deal with,” Chancellor said. “It’s going to be someone who’s older, bigger, and someone the child should be able to trust, and probably has trusted. It’s a violation of trust at the very onset. Perpetrators — especially if it’s like a dad, stepdad, or somebody like that — groom the kids, to get them ready for it. A lot of times, they spend time just getting the kids to trust them, to feel comfortable alone with them, to feel comfortable with their hands on their bodies, sharing little secrets, and giving them special treats, and things like that, to build this level of secrecy and, ‘It’s just you and me, and we have a special relationship that nobody else shares.’ So it may take some time to do that. For some perpetrators, all they need is an opportunity, just availability. They’ll put themselves in a situation, like in a school, working with some kind of sports team, in a day care, or something like that, where they just have access.”

Perpetrators often act preemptively.

“When the abuse begins, the perpetrator has to have a way to keep the victim from telling, if they’re old enough to even tell,” Chancellor said. “They’ll usually either promise them special treats or they threaten to keep them quiet. They’ll threaten something to make them stay quiet. It will be like: ‘Nobody’s going to believe you. Your mom will be very mad at you if you tell, or I’m going to do something to your pet, or I’m going to get you into trouble if you tell.’ So there’s going to be some way that they’re going to intimidate the child to stay quiet … Most children do not tell, and that’s part of the guilt that they have to deal with later because they tell themselves, ‘I could have made it stop.’ But, what they don’t realize is that, at the time it was happening, they were little. They were just kids. They were very young. Children don’t have any power over the adults or the bigger people in their lives. So they couldn’t — they couldn’t tell. So, most kids don’t. They’ll grow up and spend their whole lives and nobody ever knew.”

Telling someone else does not always solve the problem.

“They try to tell, maybe — and this just breaks the heart, when I know this — a girl tries to tell her mom that mom’s boyfriend has been doing this to her and mom refuses to believe it,” Chancellor said. “Lots of times, when somebody comes in for counseling, as a teenager or as an adult, they’re really more angry at the mom, who didn’t protect and didn’t believe, than they are at the perpetrator. They have that to deal with as well.”

Jennifer’s statement about blaming herself for her own sexual abuse raises a crucial role of counseling.

“What the lady was saying is that it’s so important for a child to know that it was not their fault,” Chancellor said. “They didn’t cause it to happen. They didn’t do anything to make it happen. They couldn’t make it stop. And it was not their fault.” Chancellor believes that there can be somewhat of a catharsis that a victim can derive, sometime down the road, from confronting the abuser.

“Most of the time, a person who has been abused will not get the opportunity to confront their abuser; sometimes, they don’t,” the licensed counselor said. “It might be good if they could. If they could come to a place to say, ‘You did this to me.’ [Perpetrators] think in such crazy terms. They justify what they did. They’ll tell themselves all kinds of things that give them the license to do what they did, then believe they were not wrong to do this. That’s why it’s so hard to work with the perpetrators. I just won’t do it, but some people will … Anyway, if they can confront their abuser and say: ‘You did this, and it was wrong. You have ruined my life.’ Whatever they want to tell them, just to be able to confront them with the truth of what they did and what they feel about that — that would help, I think. But most of the time, they don’t get a chance to do that.”

Families can prolong the victim’s nightmare because of the victim’s profound sense of betrayal.

“Sometime, in families, this is the secret that gets passed down: that Uncle Whatever molests kids, but we don’t talk about it,” Chancellor said. “We know it happened. There are people who know. But we just don’t talk about it. It’s a family secret. We don’t want the shame of that getting out … How do you go against the family? Another thing that’s hard is if a child does tell, or somehow it comes out, then what’s going to happen? This child now is the focus of all this attention. They’re on the spot, they feel scared, they’re feeling guilty, and now the family is falling apart. So mom’s all upset. Somebody has to leave the house. Maybe even the kids have to leave the house. Now we’ve got [Child Protective Services] involved. The child has opened a huge can of worms — they think. Everybody is angry and upset, and they think it’s all their fault because they told. That’s why the victim needs so much support.”

Especially needed is support from key people.

As Chancellor explained: “If the mom is supportive and protective, then that makes it so much better, but if she’s not, then it just makes it so much worse … If it was a male perpetrator, and then the dad is a protective dad, I would think that could go a long way toward helping that child to cope because the child will be able to understand that not all men are like this, my dad loves me and wants to protect me, and keep me safe. Even though this has happened, my dad still loves me and doesn’t see me as a bad person. That would be extremely important, especially for a little girl.”

Counselors have methods to reach the small children.

“I think, with little ones, a lot of times what helps is play therapy,” Chancellor said. “I’ve used that because it gives them a chance to act out how they felt. They may not act out the act itself necessarily, although sometimes that does happen, but they act out anger and fear in their little place that they do, with the dolls or the play house.”

Remember this: “If the person is a perpetrator, the chances are that they have done this more than once,” Chancellor said.

As The Advocate’s editor, Vanesa Brasher, reported March 16 on www.YourEastexNews.com, www.YourClevelandNews.com, and YourDaytonNews.com, there are sources of help if you are a victim of a sexual crime or know someone who is: the SAAFE House at 936-291-3369 or 936-327-2513, Houston Area Women’s Center at 713-528-7273, and Montgomery County Women’s Center at 936-441-7273. Additionally, crime victim advocates can be reached through area law enforcement agencies.

Chancellor can be reached at her private practice at 936-933-4391. The Livingston offices of Clark Psychological and Consultation PC can be reached at 936-327-9400. Clark’s toll-free number is 800-657-2314.